Chapter I: The Nile and Egypt (2)

1 THE NILE GOD: Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, after a statue in
the British Museum. The dedication of this statue took place
about 880 B.c. The giver was Sheshonqu, high-priest of Amon
in Thebes, afterwards King of Egypt under the name of
Sheshhonqû II., and he is represented as standing behind the
leg of the god.

1 Reproduced from a bas-relief in the small temple of
Philae, built by Rajan and his successors. The window or
door of this temple opened upon gen, and by comparing the
drawing of the Egyptian artist with the view i the end of
the chamber, it is easy to recognize the original of this
cliff bouette in the piled-up rocks of the island. By a
mistake of the modern copyist's, his drawing faces the wrong
way.

Several towns were dedicated to him: Hâthâpi, Nûit-Hâpi, Nilo-polis. It was told in the Thebaïd how the god dwelt within a grotto, or shrine (tophit), in the island of Biggeh, whence he issued at the inundation. This tradition dates from a time when the cataract was believed to be at the end of the world, and to bring down the heavenly river upon earth. Two yawning gulfs (_qorîti_), at the foot of the two granite cliffs (_monîti_) between which it ran, gave access to this mysterious retreat. A bas-relief from Philae represents blocks of stone piled one above another, the vulture of the south and the hawk of the north, each perched on a summit, wearing a panther skin, with both arms upheld in adoration. The statue is mutilated: the end of the nose, the beard, and part of the tray have disappeared, but are restored in the illustration. The two little birds hanging alongside the geese, together with a bunch of ears of corn, are fat quails, and the circular chamber wherein Hâpi crouches concealed, clasping a libation vase in either hand. A single coil of a serpent outlines the contour of this chamber, and leaves a narrow passage between its overlapping head and tail through which the rising waters may overflow at the time appointed, bringing to Egypt "all things good, and sweet, and pure," whereby gods and men are fed. Towards the summer solstice, at the very moment when the sacred water from the gulfs of Syene reached Silsileh, the priests of the place, sometimes the reigning sovereign, or one of his sons, sacrificed a bull and geese, and then cast into the waters a sealed roll of papyrus. This was a written order to do all that might insure to Egypt the benefits of a normal inundation. When Pharaoh himself deigned to officiate, the memory of the event was preserved by a stela engraved upon the rocks. Even in his absence, the festivals of the Nile were among the most solemn and joyous of the land. According to a tradition transmitted from age to age, the prosperity or adversity of the year was dependent upon the splendour and fervour with which they were celebrated. Had the faithful shown the slightest lukewarmness, the Nile might have refused to obey the command and failed to spread freely over the surface of the country. Peasants from a distance, each bringing his own provisions, ate their meals together for days, and lived in a state of brutal intoxication as long as this kind of fair lasted. On the great day itself, the priests came forth in procession from the sanctuary, bearing the statue of the god along the banks, to the sound of instruments and the chanting of hymns.

1 From a drawing by Faucher-Gudin, after a photograph by
Béato.

"I.--Hail to thee, Hâpi!--who appearest in the land and comest--to give life to Egypt;--thou who dost hide thy coming in darkness--in this very day whereon thy coming is sung,--wave, which spreadest over the orchards created by Ra--to give life to all them that are athirst--who refusest to give drink unto the desert--of the overflow of the waters of heaven; as soon as thou descendest,--Sibû, the earth-god, is enamoured of bread,--Napri, the god of grain, presents his offering,--Phtah maketh every workshop to prosper.

"II.--Lord of the fish! as soon as he passeth the cataract--the birds no longer descend upon the fields;--creator of corn, maker of barley,--he prolongeth the existence of temples.--Do his fingers cease from their labours, or doth he suffer?--then are all the millions of beings in misery;--doth he wane in heaven? then the gods--themselves, and all men perish.

"III.--The cattle are driven mad, and all the world--both great and small, are in torment!--But if, on the contrary, the prayers of men are heard at his rising--and (for them) he maketh himself Khnûmû,--when he ariseth, then the earth shouts for joy,--then are all bellies joyful,--each back is shaken with laughter,--and every tooth grindeth.

"IV.--Bringing food, rich in sustenance,--creator of all good things,--lord of all seeds of life, pleasant unto his elect,--if his friendship is secured--he produceth fodder for the cattle,--and he provideth for the sacrifices of all the gods,--finer than any other is the incense which cometh from him;--he taketh possession of the two lands--and the granaries are filled, the storehouses are prosperous,--and the goods of the poor are multiplied.

"V.--He is at the service of all prayers to answer them,--withholding nothing. To make boats to be that is his strength.--Stones are not sculptured for him--nor statues whereon the double crown is placed;--he is unseen;--no tribute is paid unto him and no offerings are brought unto him,--he is not charmed by words of mystery;--the place of his dwelling is unknown, nor can his shrine be found by virtue of magic writings.

"VI.--There is no house large enough for thee,--nor any who may penetrate within thy heart!--Nevertheless, the generations of thy children rejoice in thee--for thou dost rule as a king--whose decrees are established for the whole earth,--who is manifest in presence of the people of the South and of the North,--by whom the tears are washed from every eye,--and who is lavish of his bounties.

"VII.--Where sorrow was, there doth break forth joy--and every heart rejoiceth. Sovkû, the crocodile, the child of Nit, leaps for gladness;[*]--for the Nine gods who accompany thee have ordered all things,--the overflow giveth drink unto the fields--and maketh all men valiant; one man taketh to drink of the labour of another,--without charge being brought against him.[**]

* The goddess Nît, the heifer born from the midst of the
primordial waters, had two crocodiles as her children, which
are sometimes represented on the monuments as hanging from
her bosom. Both the part played by these animals, and the
reason for connecting them with the goddess, are still
imperfectly understood.

** This is an allusion to the quarrels and lawsuits
resulting from the distribution of the water in years when
the Nile was poor or bad. If the inundation is abundant,
disputes are at an end.

"IX.--If thou dost enter in the midst of songs to go forth in the midst of gladness,--if they dance with joy when thou comest forth out of the unknown,--it is that thy heaviness is death and corruption.--And when thou art implored to give the water of the year,--the people of the Thebai'd and of the North are seen side by side,--each man with the tools of his trade,--none tarrieth behind his neighbour;--of all those who clothed themselves, no man clotheth himself (with festive garments)--the children of Thot, the god of riches, no longer adorn themselves with jewels,--nor the Nine gods, but they are in the night!--As soon as thou hast answered by the rising,--each one anointeth himself with perfumes.

"X.--Establisher of true riches, desire of men,--here are seductive words in order that thou mayest reply;--if thou dost answer mankind by waves of the heavenly Ocean,--Napri, the grain-god, presents his offering,--all the gods adore (thee),--the birds no longer descend upon the hills;--though that which thy hand formeth were of gold--or in the shape of a brick of silver,--it is not lapis-lazuli that we eat,--but wheat is of more worth than precious stones.

"XI.--They have begun to sing unto thee upon the harp,--they sing unto thee keeping time with their hands,--and the generations of thy children rejoice in thee, and they have filled thee with salutations of praise;--for it is the god of Riches who adorneth the earth,--who maketh barks to prosper in the sight of man--who rejoiceth the heart of women with child--who loveth the increase of the flocks.

"XII.--When thou art risen in the city of the Prince,--then is the rich man filled--the small man (the poor) disdaineth the lotus,--all is solid and of good quality,--all herbage is for his children.--Doth he forget to give food?--prosperity forsaketh the dwellings,--and earth falleth into a wasting sickness."

The word Nile is of uncertain origin. We have it from the Greeks, and they took it from a people foreign to Egypt, either from the Phoenicians, the Khîti, the Libyans, or from people of Asia Minor. When the Egyptians themselves did not care to treat their river as the god Hâpi, they called it the sea, or the great river. They had twenty terms or more by which to designate the different phases which it assumed according to the seasons, but they would not have understood what was meant had one spoken to them of the Nile. The name Egypt also is part of the Hellenic tradition; perhaps it was taken from the temple-name of Memphis, Hâikûphtah, which barbarian coast tribes of the Mediterranean must long have had ringing in their ears as that of the most important and wealthiest town to be found upon the shores of their sea. The Egyptians called themselves Bomitû, Botû, and their country Qîmit, the black land. Whence came they? How far off in time are we to carry back the date of their arrival? The oldest monuments hitherto known scarcely transport us further than six thousand years, yet they are of an art so fine, so well determined in its main outlines, and reveal so ingeniously combined a system of administration, government, and religion, that we infer a long past of accumulated centuries behind them. It must always be difficult to estimate exactly the length of time needful for a race as gifted as were the Ancient Egyptians to rise from barbarism into a high degree of culture. Nevertheless, I do not think that we shall be misled in granting them forty or fifty centuries wherein to bring so complicated an achievement to a successful issue, and in placing their first appearance at eight or ten thousand years before our era. Their earliest horizon was a very limited one. Their gaze might wander westward over the ravine-furrowed plains of the Libyan desert without reaching that fabled land of Manu where the sun set every evening; but looking eastward from the valley, they could see the peak of Bâkhû, which marked the limit of regions accessible to man.

Beyond these regions lay the beginnings of To-nûtri, the land of the gods, and the breezes passing over it were laden with its perfumes, and sometimes wafted them to mortals lost in the desert.[*]

* The perfumes and the odoriferous woods of the Divine
Land were celebrated in Egypt. A traveller or hunter,
crossing the desert, "could not but be vividly impressed by
suddenly becoming aware, in the very midst of the desert, of
the penetrating scent of the _robul (Puliciaria undulata_,
Schwbine.), which once followed us throughout a day and two
nights, in some places without our being able to distinguish
whence it came; as, for instance, when we were crossing
tracts of country without any traces of vegetation whatever."
(Golenischeff).

Northward, the world came to an end towards the lagoons of the Delta, whose inaccessible islands were believed to be the sojourning-place of souls after death. As regards the south, precise knowledge of it scarcely went beyond the defiles of Gebel Sil-sileh, where the last remains of the granite threshold had perhaps not altogether disappeared. The district beyond Gebel Silsileh, the province of Konûsit, was still a foreign and almost mythic country, directly connected with heaven by means of the cataract. Long after the Egyptians had broken through this restricted circle, the names of those places which had as it were marked out their frontiers, continued to be associated in their minds with the idea of the four cardinal points. Bâkhû and Manu were still the most frequent expressions for the extreme East and West. Nekhabit and Bûto, the most populous towns in the neighbourhoods of Gebel Silsileh and the ponds of the Delta, were set over against each other to designate South and North. It was within these narrow limits that Egyptian civilization struck root and ripened, as in a closed vessel. What were the people by whom it was developed, the country whence they came, the races to which they belonged, is to-day unknown. The majority would place their cradle-land in Asia,[*] but cannot agree in determining the route which was followed in the emigration to Africa.

* The greater number of contemporary Egyptologists, Brugsch,
Ebers,--Lauth, Lieblein, have rallied to this opinion, in
the train of E. de Rougé; but the most extreme position has
been taken up by Hommel, the Assyriologist, who is inclined
to derive Egyptian civilization entirely from the
Babylonian. After having summarily announced this thesis in
his _Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens_, p. 12, et seq.,
he has set it forth at length in a special treatise, _Der
Babylonische Ursprung der àgyptischen Kultur_, 1892, wherein
he endeavours to prove that the Heliopolitan myths, and
hence the whole Egyptian religion, are derived from the
cults of Eridû, and would make the name of the Egyptian city
Onû, or Anû, identical with that of _Nûn-H, Nûn_, which is
borne by the Chaldean.

Some think that the people took the shortest road across the Isthmus of Suez, others give them longer peregrinations and a more complicated itinerary. They would have them cross the Straits of Bab el-Mandeb, and then the Abyssinian mountains, and, spreading northward and keeping along the Nile, finally settle in the Egypt of to-day. A more minute examination compels us to recognize that the hypothesis of an Asiatic origin, however attractive it may seem, is somewhat difficult to maintain. The bulk of the Egyptian population presents the characteristics of those white races which have been found established from all antiquity on the Mediterranean slope of the Libyan continent; this population is of African origin, and came to Egypt from the West or South-West. In the valley, perhaps, it may have met with a black race which it drove back or destroyed; and there, perhaps, too, it afterwards received an accretion of Asiatic elements, introduced by way of the isthmus and the marshes of the Delta. But whatever may be the origin of the ancestors of the Egyptians, they were scarcely settled upon the banks of the Nile before the country conquered, and assimilated them to itself, as it has never ceased to do in the case of strangers who have occupied it. At the time when their history begins for us, all the inhabitants had long formed but one people, with but one language.

This language seems to be connected with the Semitic tongues by many of its roots. It forms its personal pronouns, whether isolated or suffixed, in a similar way. One of the tenses of the conjugation, and that the simplest and most archaic, is formed with identical affixes. Without insisting upon resemblances which are open to doubt, it may be almost affirmed that most of the grammatical processes used in Semitic languages are to be found in a rudimentary condition in Egyptian. One would say that the language of the people of Egypt and the languages of the Semitic races, having once belonged to the same group, had separated very early, at a time when the vocabulary and the grammatical system of the group had not as yet taken definite shape. Subject to different influences, the two families would treat in diverse fashion the elements common to both. The Semitic dialects continued to develop for centuries, while the Egyptian language, although earlier cultivated, stopped short in its growth. "If it is obvious that there was an original connexion between the language of Egypt and that of Asia, this connexion is nevertheless sufficiently remote to leave to the Egyptian race a distinct physiognomy." We recognize it in sculptured and painted portraits, as well as in thousands of mummied bodies out of subterranean tombs. The highest type of Egyptian was tall and slender, with a proud and imperious air in the carriage of his head and in his whole bearing. He had wide and full shoulders, well-marked and vigorous pectoral muscles, muscular arms, a long, fine hand, slightly developed hips, and sinewy legs. The detail of the knee-joint and the muscles of the calf are strongly marked beneath the skin; the long, thin, and low-arched feet are flattened out at the extremities owing to the custom of going barefoot. The head is rather short, the face oval, the forehead somewhat retreating. The eyes are wide and fully opened, the cheekbones not too marked, the nose fairly prominent, and either straight or aquiline. The mouth is long, the lips full, and lightly ridged along their outline; the teeth small, even, well-set, and remarkably sound; the ears are set high on the head. At birth the skin is white, but darkens in proportion to its exposure to the sun. Men are generally painted red in the pictures, though, as a matter of fact, there must already have been all the shades which we see among the present population^ from a most delicate, rose-tinted complexion to that of a smoke-coloured bronze. Women, who were less exposed to the sun, are generally painted yellow, the tint paler in proportion as they rise in the social scale. The hair was inclined to be wavy, and even to curl into little ringlets, but without ever turning into the wool of the negro.

1 Statue of Rânofir in the Gîzeh Museum (Vth dynasty), after
a photograph by Émil Brugsch-Bey.

The beard was scanty, thick only upon the chin. Such was the highest type; the commoner was squat, dumpy, and heavy. Chest and shoulders seem to be enlarged at the expense of the pelvis and the hips, to such an extent as to make the want of proportion between the upper and lower parts of the body startling and ungraceful. The skull is long, somewhat retreating, and slightly flattened on the top; the features are coarse, and as though carved in flesh by great strokes of the blocking-out chisel. Small frseuated eyes, a short nose, flanked by widely distended nostrils, round cheeks, a square chin, thick, but not curling lips--this unattractive and ludicrous physiognomy, sometimes animated by an expression of cunning which recalls the shrewd face of an old French peasant, is often lighted up by gleams of gentleness and of melancholy good-nature. The external characteristics of these two principal types in the ancient monuments, in all varieties of modifications, may still be seen among the living. The profile copied from a Theban mummy taken at hazard from a necropolis of the XVIIIth dynasty, and compared with the likeness of a modern Luxor peasant, would almost pass for a family portrait. Wandering Bisharîn have inherited the type of face of a great noble, the contemporary of Kheops; and any peasant woman of the Delta may bear upon her shoulders che head of a twelfth-dynasty king. A citizen of Cairo, gazing with wonder at the statues of Khafra or of Seti I. in the Gîzeh Museum, is himself, feature for feature, the very image of those ancient Pharaohs, though removed from them by fifty centuries.

1 The face of the woman here given was taken separately,
and was subsequently attached to the figure of an Egyptian
woman whom Naville had photographed sitting beside a
colossal head. The nose of the statue has been restored.

Until quite recently nothing, or all but nothing, had been discovered which could be attributed to the primitive races of Egypt: even the flint weapons and implements which had been found in various places could not be ascribed to them with any degree of certainty, for the Egyptians continued to use stone long after metal was known to them. They made stone arrowheads, hammers, and knives, not only in the time of the Pharaohs, but under the Romans, and during the whole period of the Middle Ages, and the manufacture of them has not yet entirely died out.[**]

** An entire collection of flint tools--axes, adzes,
knives, and sickles--mostly with wooden handles, were found
by Prof. Pétrie in the ruins of Kahun, at the entrance to
the Fayûm: these go back to the time of the twelfth dynasty,
more than three thousand years before our era. Mariette had
previously pointed out to the learned world the fact that a
Coptic _Reis_, Salîb of Abydos, in charge of the
excavations, shaved his head with a flint knife, according
to the custom of his youth (1820-35). I knew the man, who
died at over eighty years of age in 1887; he was still
faithful to his flint implement, while his sons and the
whole population of El Kharbeh were using nothing but steel
razors. As his scalp was scraped nearly raw by the
operation, he used to cover his head with fresh leaves to
cool the inflamed skin.

These objects, and the workshops where they were made, might therefore be less ancient than the greater part of the inscribed monuments. But if so far we had found no examples of any work belonging to the first ages, we met in historic times with certain customs which were out of harmony with the general civilization of the period. A comparison of these customs with analogous practices of barbarous nations threw light upon the former, completed their meaning, and showed us at the same time the successive stages through which the Egyptian people had to pass before reaching their highest civilization. We knew, for example, that even as late as the Cæsars, girls belonging to noble families at Thebes were consecrated to the service of Amon, and were thus licensed to a life of immorality, which, however, did not prevent them from making rich marriages when age obliged them to retire from office. Theban women were not the only people in the world to whom such licence was granted or imposed upon them by law; wherever in a civilized country we see a similar practice, we may recognize in it an ancient custom which in the course of centuries has degenerated into a religious observance. The institution of the women of Amon is a legacy from a time when the practice of polyandry obtained, and marriage did not yet exist. Age and maternity relieved them from this obligation, and preserved them from those incestuous connections of which we find examples in other races. A union of father and daughter, however, was perhaps not wholly forbidden,[*] and that of brother and sister seems to have been regarded as perfectly right and natural; the words brother and sister possessing in Egyptian love-songs the same significance as lover and mistress with us.

* E. de Rouge held that Rameses II. married at least two of
his daughters, Bint Anati and Honittui; Wiedemann admits
that Psammetichus I. had in the same way taken to wife
Nitocris, who had been born to him by the Theban princess
Shapenuapit. The Achæmenidan kings did the same: Artaxerxes
married two of his own daughters.

Paternity was necessarily doubtful in a community of this kind, and hence the tie between fathers and children was slight; there being no family, in the sense in which we understand the word, except as it centred around the mother.

Maternal descent was, therefore, the only one openly acknowledged, and the affiliation of the child was indicated by the name of the mother alone. When the woman ceased to belong to all, and confined herself to one husband, the man reserved to himself the privilege of taking as many wives as he wished, or as he was able to keep, beginning with his own sisters. All wives did not enjoy identical rights: those born of the same parents as the man, or those of equal rank with himself, preserved their independence. If the law pronounced him the master, _nibû_, to whom they owed obedience and fidelity, they were mistresses of the house, _nîbît pirû_, as well as wives, _himitû_, and the two words of the title express their condition. Each of them occupied, in fact, her own house, _pirû_, which she had from her parents or her husband, and of which she was absolute mistress, _nîbît_. She lived in it and performed in it without constraint all a woman's duties; feeding the fire, grinding the corn, occupying herself in cooking and weaving, making clothing and perfumes, nursing and teaching her children. When her husband visited her, he was a guest whom she received on an equal footing. It appears that at the outset these various wives were placed under the authority of an older woman, whom they looked on as their mother, and who defended their rights and interests against the master; but this custom gradually disappeared, and in historic times we read of it as existing only in the families of the gods. The female singers consecrated to Amon and other deities, owed obedience to several superiors, of whom the principal (generally the widow of a king or high priest) was called _chief-superior of the ladies of the harem of Amon_. Besides these wives, there were concubines, slaves purchased or born in the house, prisoners of war, Egyptians of inferior class, who were the chattels of the man and of whom he could dispose as he wished. All the children of one father were legitimate, whether their mother were a wife or merely a concubine, but they did not all enjoy the same advantages; those among them who were born of a brother or sister united in legitimate marriage, took precedence of those whose mother was a wife of inferior rank or a slave. In the family thus constituted, the woman, to all appearances, played the principal part. Children recognized the parental relationship in the mother alone. The husband appears to have entered the house of his wives, rather than the wives to have entered his, and this appearance of inferiority was so marked that the Greeks were deceived by it. They affirmed that the woman was supreme in Egypt; the man at the time of marriage promised obedience to her and entered into a contract not to raise any objection to her commands.

We had, therefore, good grounds for supposing that the first Egyptians were semi-savages, like those still living in Africa and America, having an analogous organization, and similar weapons and tools. A few lived in the desert, in the oasis of Libya, or in the deep valleys of the Red Land--Doshirit, To Doshiru--between the Nile and the sea; the poverty of the country fostering their native savagery. Others, settled on the Black Land, gradually became civilized, and we have found of late considerable remains of those of their generations who, if not anterior to the times of written records, were at least contemporary with the earliest kings of the first historical dynasty.

Their houses were like those of the fellahs of to-day, low huts of wattle daubed with puddled clay, or of bricks dried in the sun. They contained one room, either oblong or square, the door being the only aperture. Those of the richer class only were large enough to make it needful to support the roof by means of one or more trunks of trees, which did duty for columns. Earthen pots, turned by hand, flint knives and other implements, mats of reeds or plaited straw, two flat stones for grinding corn, a few pieces of wooden furniture, stools, and head-rests for use at night, comprised all the contents. Their ordinary pottery is heavy and almost devoid of ornament, but some of the finer kinds have been moulded and baked in wickerwork baskets, which have left a quaint trellis-like impression on the surface of the clay. In many cases the vases are bicolour, the body being of a fine smooth red, polished with a stone, while the neck and base are of an intense black, the surface of which is even more shining than that of the red part. Sometimes they are ornamented with patterns in white of flowers, palms, ostriches, gazelles, boats with undulated or broken lines, or geometrical figures of a very simple nature. More often the ground is coloured a fine yellow, and the decoration has been traced in red lines. Jars, saucers, double vases, flat plates, large cups, supports for amphorae, trays raised on a foot--in short, every kind of form is found in use at that remote period. The men went about nearly naked, except the nobles, who wore a panther's skin, sometimes thrown over the shoulders, sometimes drawn round the waist, and covering the lower part of the body, the animal's tail touching the heels behind, as we see later in several representations of the negroes of the Upper Nile. They smeared their limbs with grease or oil, and they tattooed their faces and bodies, at least in part; but in later times this practice was retained by the lower classes only. On the other hand, the custom of painting the face was never given up. To complete their toilet, it was necessary to accentuate the arch of the eyebrow with a line of kohl (antimony powder). A similar black line surrounded and prolonged the oval of the eye to the middle of the temple, a layer of green coloured the under lid, and ochre and carmine enlivened the tints of the cheeks and lips. The hair, plaited, curled, oiled, and plastered with grease, formed an erection which was as complicated in the case of the man as in that of the woman.

1 Wooden statue in the Gîzeh Museum (IVth dynasty), drawn by
Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Béchard.

2 Statue of the second prophet of Amon, Aa-nen, in the Turin
Museum (XVIIIth dynasty).

Should the hair be too short, a black or blue wig, dressed with much skill, was substituted for it; ostrich feathers waved on the heads of warriors, and a large lock, flattened behind the right ear, distinguished the military or religious chiefs from their subordinates. When the art of weaving became common, a belt and loin-cloth of white linen replaced the leathern garment. Fastened round the waist, but so low as to leave the navel uncovered, the loin-cloth frequently reached to the knee; the hinder part was frequently drawn between the legs and attached in front to the belt, thus forming a kind of drawers. Tails of animals and wild beast's skin were henceforth only the insignia of authority with which priests and princes adorned themselves on great days and at religious ceremonies. The skin was sometimes carelessly thrown over the left shoulder and swayed with the movement of the body; sometimes it was carefully adjusted over one shoulder and under the other, so as to bring the curve of the chest into prominence. The head of the animal, skilfully prepared and enlivened by large eyes of enamel, rested on the shoulder or fell just below the waist of the wearer; the paws, with the claws attached, hung down over the thighs; the spots of the skin were manipulated so as to form five-pointed stars. On going out-of-doors, a large wrap was thrown over all; this covering was either smooth or hairy, similar to that in which the Nubians and Abyssinians of the present day envelop themselves. It could be draped in various ways; transversely over the left shoulder like the fringed shawl of the Chaldeans, or hanging straight from both shoulders like a mantle.[**]

** This costume, to which Egyptologists have not given
sufficient attention, is frequently represented on the
monuments. Besides the two statues reproduced above, I may
cite those of Uahibri and of Thoth-nofir in the Louvre, and
the Lady Nofrit in the Gîzeh Museum. Thothotpû in his tomb
wears this mantle. Khnumhotpû and several of his workmen are
represented in it at Beni-Hasan, as also one of the princes
of Elephantine in the recently discovered tombs, besides
many Egyptians of all classes in the tombs of Thebes (a
good example is in the tomb of Harmhabi). The reason
why it does not figure more often is, in the first place,
that the Egyptian artists experienced actual difficulty in
representing the folds of its drapery, although these were
simple compared with the complicated arrangement of the
Roman toga; finally, the wall-paintings mostly portray
either interior scenes, or agricultural labour, or the work
of various trades, or episodes of war, or religious
ceremonies, in all of which the mantle plays no part. Every
Egyptian peasant, however, possessed his own, and it was in
constant use in his daily life.

In fact, it did duty as a cloak, sheltering the wearer from the sun or from the rain, from the heat or from the cold. They never sought to transform it into a luxurious garment of state, as was the case in later times with the Roman toga, whose amplitude secured a certain dignity of carriage, and whose folds, carefully adjusted beforehand, fell around the body with studied grace. The Egyptian mantle when not required was thrown aside and folded up. The material being fine and soft it occupied but a small space and was reduced to a long thin roll; the ends being then fastened together, it was slung over the shoulder and round the body like a cavalry cloak.[*]

* Many draughtsmen, ignorant of what they had to represent,
have made incorrect copies of the manner in which this cloak
was worn; but examples of it are numerous, although until
now attention has not been called to them. The following are
a few instances taken at random of the way in which it was
used: Pepi I., fighting against the nomads of Sinai, has the
cloak, but with the two ends passed through the belt of his
loin-cloth; at Zawyet el-Maiyitîn, Khunas, killing birds
with the boomerang from his boat, wears it, but simply
thrown over the left shoulder, with the two extremities
hanging free. Khnumhotpû at Beni-Hasan, the Khrihdbi, the
overseers, or the peasants, all have it rolled and slung
round them; the Prince of el-Bersheh wears it like a mantle
in folds over the two shoulders. If it is objected that the
material could not be reduced to such small dimensions as
those represented in these drawings of what I believe to be
the Egyptian cloak, I way cite our cavalry capes, when
rolled and slung, as an instance of what good packing will
do in reducing volume.

1 Statue of Khiti in the Gîzeh Museum (XIIth and XIIIth
dynasties), drawn by Faucher-Gudin.

Travellers, shepherds, all those whose occupations called them to the fields, carried it as a bundle at the ends of their sticks; once arrived at the scene of their work, they deposited it in a corner with their provisions until they required it. The women were at first contented with a loin-cloth like that of the men; it was enlarged and lengthened till it reached the ankle below and the bosom above, and became a tightly fitting garment, with two bands over the shoulders, like braces, to keep it in place. The feet were not always covered; on certain occasions, however, sandals of coarse leather, plaited straw, split reed, or even painted wood, adorned those shapely Egyptian feet, which, to suit our taste, should be a little shorter.

1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from one of the spinning-women at
the Paris Exhibition of 1889. It was restored from the
paintings in the tomb of Khnumhotpû at Beni-Hasan.

Both men and women loved ornaments, and covered their necks, breasts, arms, wrists, and ankles with many rows of necklaces and bracelets. The bracelets were made of elephant ivory, mother-of-pearl, or even flint, very cleverly perforated. The necklaces were composed of strings of pierced shells,[**] interspersed with seeds and little pebbles, either sparkling or of unusual shapes.[***] Subsequently imitations in terra-cotta replaced the natural shells, and precious stones were substituted for pebbles, as were also beads of enamel, either round, pear-shaped, or cylindrical: the necklaces were terminated and a uniform distance maintained between the rows of beads, by several slips of wood, bone, ivory, porcelain, or terra-cotta, pierced with holes, through which ran the threads.

** The burying-places of Abydos, especially the most
ancient, have furnished us with millions of shells, pierced
and threaded as necklaces; they all belong to the species of
cowries used as money in Africa at the present day.

*** Necklaces of seeds have been found in the tombs of
Abydos, Thebes, and Gebelên. Of these Schweinfurth
has identified, among others, the _Cassia absus_, "a
weed of the Soudan whose seeds are sold in the drug bazaar
at Cairo and Alexandria under the name of _shishn_, as a
remedy, which is in great request among the natives, for
ophthalmia." For the necklaces of pebbles, cf. Maspeeo,
Guide du visiteur, pp. 270, 271, No. 4129. A considerable
number of these pebbles, particularly those of strange
shape, or presenting a curious combination of colours, must
have been regarded as amulets or fetishes by their Egyptian
owners; analogous cases, among other peoples, have been
pointed out by E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p.
189.

1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a portrait of Pharaoh Seti I.
of the XIXth dynasty: the lower part of the necklace has
been completed.

Weapons, at least among the nobility, were an indispensable part of costume. Most of them were for hand-to-hand fighting: sticks, clubs, lances furnished with a sharpened bone or stone point, axes and daggers of flint,[*] sabres and clubs of bone or wood variously shaped, pointed or rounded at the end, with blunt or sharp blades,--inoffensive enough to look at, but, wielded by a vigorous hand, sufficient to break an arm, crush in the ribs, or smash a skull with all desirable precision.[**] The plain or triple curved bow was the favourite weapon for attack at a distance,[***] but in addition to this there were the sling, the javelin, and a missile almost forgotten nowadays, the boomerang, we have no proof however, that the Egyptians handled the boomerang[****] with the skill of the Australians, or that they knew how to throw it so as to bring it back to its point of departure.[v]

* In several museums, notably at Leyden, we find Egyptian
axes of stone, particularly of serpentine, both rough and
polished.

** In primitive times the bone of an animal served as a
club. This is proved by the shape of the object held in
the hand in the sign and the hieroglyph which is the
determinative in writing for all ideas of violence or
brute force, comes down to us from a time when the principal
weapon was the club, or a bone serving as a club.

*** For the two principal shapes of the bow, see Lepsius,
Der Bogen in der Hieroglypliik (Zeitschrift, 1872, pp. 79-
88). From the earliest times the sign m£ portrays the
soldier equipped with the bow and bundle of arrows; the
quiver was of Asiatic origin, and was not adopted until much
later. In the contemporary texts of the first dynasties, the
idea of weapons is conveyed by the bow, arrow, and club or
axe.

**** The boomerang is still used by certain tribes of the
Nile valley. It is portrayed in the most ancient tombs,
and every museum possesses examples, varying in shape.
Besides the ordinary boomerang, the Egyptians used one which
ended in a knob, and another of semicircular shape: this
latter, reproduced in miniature in cornelian or in red
jasper, served as an amulet, and was placed on the mummy to
furnish the deceased in the other world with a fighting or
hunting weapon.

v The Australian boomerang is much larger than the Egyptian
one; it is about a yard in length, two inches in width, and
three sixteenths of an inch in thickness. For the manner of
handling it, and what can be done with it, see Lubbock,
Prehistoric Man, pp. 402, 403.

2 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a painting in the tomb of
Khnumhotpû at Beni-Hasan.

3 The blade is of bronze, and is attached to the wooden
handle by interlacing thongs of leather (Gizeh Museum).
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-
Bey.

Such was approximately the most ancient equipment as far as we can ascertain; but at a very early date copper and iron were known in Egypt.[**] Long before historic times, the majority of the weapons in wood were replaced by those of metal,--daggers, sabres, hatchets, which preserved, however, the shape of the old wooden instruments.

** Metals were introduced into Egypt in very ancient times,
since the class of blacksmiths is associated with the
worship of Horus of Edfû, and appears in the account of the
mythical wars of that God. The earliest tools we possess, in
copper or bronze, date from the IVth dynasty: pieces of iron
have been found from time to time in the masonry of the
Great Pyramid. Mons Montélius has again and again contested
the authenticity of these discoveries, and he thinks that
iron was not known in Egypt till a much later period.

Those wooden weapons which were retained, were used for hunting, or were only brought out on solemn occasions when tradition had to be respected. The war-baton became the commander's wand of authority, and at last degenerated into the walking-stick of the rich or noble.

3 Bas-relief in the temple of Luxor, from a photograph
taken by Insinger in 1886.

The club at length represented merely the rank of a chieftain,[*] while the crook and the wooden-handled mace, with its head of ivory, diorite, granite, or white stone, the favourite weapons of princes, continued to the last the most revered insignia of royalty.[**]

Life was passed in comparative ease and pleasure. Of the ponds left in the open country by the river at its fall, some dried up more or less quickly during the winter, leaving on the soil an immense quantity of fish, the possession of which birds and wild beasts disputed with man.[***]

* The wooden club most commonly represented is the usual
insignia of a nobleman. Several kinds of clubs, somewhat
difficult for us moderns to distinguish, yet bearing
different names, formed a part of funereal furniture.

** The crook is the sceptre of a prince, a Pharaoh, or a
god; the white mace has still the value apparently of a
weapon in the hands of the king who brandishes it over a
group of prisoners or over an ox which he is sacrificing to
a divinity. Most museums possess specimens of the stone
heads of these maces, but until lately their use was not
known. I had several placed in the Boulak Museum. It already
possessed a model of one entirely of wood.

*** Cf. the description of these pools given by Geoffroy-
Saint-Hilaire in speaking of the fahaka. Even at the present
day the jackals come down from the mountains in the night,
and regale themselves with the fish left on the ground by
the gradual drying up of these ponds.

Other pools, however, remained till the returning inundation, as so many _vivaria_ in which the fish were preserved for dwellers on the banks. Fishing with the harpoon, made either of stone or of metal, with the line, with a net or with traps, were all methods of fishing known and used by the Egyptians from early times. Where the ponds failed, the neighbouring Nile furnished them with inexhaustible supplies. Standing in light canoes, or rather supported by a plank on bundles of reeds bound together, they ventured into mid-stream, in spite of the danger arising from the ever-present hippopotamus; or they penetrated up the canals amid a thicket of aquatic plants, to bring down with the boomerang the birds which found covert there.

1 Tomb of Ti. Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Dûmichen,
Besultate, vol. ii. pl. x.

The fowl and fish which could not be eaten fresh, were dried, salted, or smoked, and kept for a rainy day. Like the river, the desert had its perils and its resources. Only too frequently, the lion, the leopard, the panther, and other large felidse were met with there.

1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a painting by Beni-Hasan,
Lepsius, Denhm., ii. 136.

2 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bas-relief of Ptahhotpû.
The dogs on the upper level are of hyenoid type, those on
the lower are Abyssinian greyhounds.

The nobles, like the Pharaohs of later times, deemed it as their privilege or duty to stalk and destroy these animals, pursuing them even to their dens. The common people preferred attacking the gazelle, the oryx, the mouflon sheep, the ibex, the wild ox, and the ostrich, but did not disdain more humble game, such as the porcupine and long-eared hare: nondescript packs, in which the jackal and the hyena ran side by side with the wolf-dog and the lithe Abyssinian greyhound, scented and retrieved for their master the prey which he had pierced with his arrows. At times a hunter, returning with the dead body of the mother, would be followed by one of her young; or a gazelle, but slightly wounded, would be taken to the village and healed of its hurt.

1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bas-relief of Ptahhotpû.
Above are seen two porcupines, the foremost of which,
emerging from his hole, has seized a grasshopper.

Such animals by daily contact with man, were gradually tamed, and formed about his dwelling a motley flock, kept partly for his pleasure and mostly for his profit, and becoming in case of necessity a ready stock of provisions.[**]

** In the same way, before the advent of Europeans, the
half-civilized tribes of North America used to keep about
their huts whole flocks of different animals, which were
tame, but not domesticated.

Efforts were therefore made to enlarge this flock, and the wish to procure animals without seriously injuring them, caused the Egyptians to use the net for birds and the lasso and the _bola_ for quadrupeds,[*]--weapons less brutal than the arrow and the javelin. The _bola_ was made by them of a single rounded stone, attached to a strap about five yards in length. The stone once thrown, the cord twisted round the legs, muzzle, or neck of the animal pursued, and by the attachment thus made the pursuer, using all his strength, was enabled to bring the beast down half strangled. The lasso has no stone attached to it, but a noose prepared beforehand, and the skill of the hunter consists in throwing it round the neck of his victim while running. They caught indifferently, without distinction of size or kind, all that chance brought within their reach. The daily chase kept up these half-tamed flocks of gazelles, wild goats, water-bucks, stocks, and ostriches, and their numbers are reckoned by hundreds on the monuments of the ancient empire.[**]

* Hunting with the bola is constantly represented in the
paintings both of the Memphite and Theban periods. Wilkinson
has confounded it with lasso-hunting, and his mistake has
been reproduced by other Egyptologists. Lasso-hunting is
seen in Lepsius, Denhn., ii. 96, in Dùmichen, _resultate_,
vol. i. pl. viii., and particularly in the numerous
sacrificial scenes where the king is supposed to be
capturing the bull of the north or south, previous to
offering it to the god.

** As the tombs of the ancient empire show us numerous
flocks of gazelles, antelopes, and storks, feeding under the
care of shepherds, Fr. Lenormant concluded that the
Egyptians of early times had succeeded in domesticating some
species, nowadays rebels to restraint. It is my belief that
the animals represented were tamed, but not domesticated,
and were the result of great hunting expeditions in the
desert. The facts which Lenormant brought forward to support
his theory may be used against him. For instance, the fawn
of the gazelle nourished by its mother does not prove that
it was bred in captivity; the gazelle may have been caught
before calving, or just after the birth of its young. The
fashion of keeping flocks of animals taken from the desert
died out between the XIIth and XVIIIth dynasties. At the
time of the new empire, they had only one or two solitary
animals as pets for women or children, the mummies of which
were sometimes buried by the side of their mistresses.

Experience alone taught the hunter to distinguish between those species from which he could draw profit, and others whose wildness made them impossible to domesticate. The subjection of the most useful kinds had not been finished when the historic period opened.

2 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a painting in a Theban tomb
of the XVIIIth dynasty.

The ass, the sheep, and the goat were already domesticated, but the pig was still out in the marshes in a semi-wild state, under the care of special herdsmen,[*] and the religious rites preserved the remembrance of the times in which the ox was so little tamed, that in order to capture while grazing the animals needed for sacrifice or for slaughter, it was necessary to use the lasso.[***]

* The hatred of the Egyptians for the pig (Herodotus, ii.
47) is attributed to mythological motives. Lippert thinks
this antipathy did not exist in Egypt in primitive times. At
the outset the pig would have been the principal food of the
people; then, like the dog in other regions, it must have
been replaced at the table by animals of a higher order--
gazelles, sheep, goats, oxen--and would have thus fallen
into contempt. To the excellent reasons given by Lippert
could be added others drawn from the study of the Egyptian
myths, to prove that the pig has often been highly esteemed.
Thus, Isis is represented, down to late times, under the
form of a sow, and a sow, whether followed or not by her
young is one of the amulets placed in the tomb with the
deceased, to secure for him the protection of the goddess.

*** Mariette, Abydos (vol. i. pl. 48 b, 53). To prevent
the animal from evading the lasso and escaping during the
sacrifice, its right hind foot was fastened to its left
horn.

Europeans are astonished to meet nowadays whole peoples who make use of herbs and plants whose flavour and properties are nauseating to us: these are mostly so many legacies from a remote past; for example, castor-oil, with which the Berbers rub their limbs, and with which the fellahîn of the Saïd flavour their bread and vegetables, was preferred before all others by the Egyptians of the Pharaonic age for anointing the body and for culinary use.[*] They had begun by eating indiscriminately every kind of fruit which the country produced. Many of these, when their therapeutic virtues had been learned by experience, were gradually banished as articles of food, and their use restricted to medicine; others fell into disuse, and only reappeared at sacrifices, or at funeral feasts; several varieties continue to be eaten to the present time--the acid fruits of the nabeca and of the carob tree, the astringent figs of the sycamore, the insipid pulp of the dam-palm, besides those which are pleasant to our Western palates, such as the common fig and the date. The vine flourished, at least in Middle and Lower Egypt; from time immemorial the art of making wine from it was known, and even the most ancient monuments enumerate half a dozen famous brands, red or white.[**]

* I have often been obliged, from politeness, when dining
with the native agents appointed by the European powers at
Port Saïd, to eat salads and mayonnaise sauces flavoured
with castor-oil; the taste was not so disagreeable as might
be at first imagined.

** The four kinds of canonical wine, brought respectively
from the north, south, east, and west of the country, formed
part of the official repast and of the wine-cellar of the
deceased from remote antiquity.

Vetches, lupins, beans, chick-peas, lentils, onions, fenugreek,[*] the bamiâ,[**] the meloukhia,[***] the arum colocasia, all grew wild in the fields, and the river itself supplied its quota of nourishing plants.

* All these species have been found in the tombs and
identified by savants in archaeological botany--Kunth,
Unger, Schweinfurth (Loret, _La Flore Pharaonique_, pp. 17,
40, 42, 43, Nos. 33, 97, 102, 104, 105, 106).

** The bamiâ, _Hibiscus esculentus_, L., is a plant of the
family of the Malvaceae, having a fruit of five divisions,
covered with prickly hairs, and pontaining round, white,
soft seeds, slightly sweet, but astringent in taste, and
very mucilaginous. It figures on the monuments of
Pharaonic times.

*** The meloukhia, _Corchorus Olitorius_, L., is a plant
belonging to the Tilliacese, which is chopped up and cooked
much the same as endive is with us, but which few Europeans
can eat with pleasure, owing to the mucilage it contains.
Theophrastus says it was celebrated for its bitterness; it
was used as food, however, in the Greek town of Alexandria.

4 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from the _Description de
l'Egypte_, Histoire Naturelle, pl. 61.